A Latin Mass

After reading John Senior's Restoration of Christian Culture this morning, where he insists that only communities and persons dedicated to work, prayer, and self-sacrifice will effect the named restoration, and defends his claim through excerpts mostly of the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, I thought it would be fitting to worship this Sunday in the old way. I found a High Latin mass being celebrated in east Arlington. Until they raise enough money for a church of their own, they are borrowing the sanctuary of a Discalced Carmelite nunnery - so that was perfect, since SS. Teresa and John were the male and female reformers of the Carmelites in the 16th century.

The nunnery is off the beaten track, up a small drive on the edge of an old stretch of development along a large road that used to be a major highway into Dallas. It is absolutely serene, almost a paradise in the midst of this humid sparse climate, surrounded like a fortification by perfectly kept, tightly aligned, deepbrown wooden stakes, and guarded by a large gate with an angel perched on each white pillar. The gardens are full of statuary and sweet-smelling trees. The sanctuary is just as carefully and beautifully designed. There is nothing there of industrial life. There are modern materials, but all is put to the service of a true architecture; itself crafted better to serve the cloistered contemplative vocation of the women who spend their lives there.

The priest gave a discursive homily on the Catholic doctrines on indulgences. Some of it very strange, and I wonder whether he described it quite right, because some of it sounded as if it contradicted what little I've read in Aquinas. However, the imaginative background of the doctrines struck me as it had never done before, despite all I've supposedly learned about the body of Christ being one, and each being spiritually tied to each. There is an economy in the body of Christ, where good and evil are shared and felt between one Christian and another, not only in a general, formless sense which only has meaning in devotional rhetoric, but in a concrete sense. The disorder left on the soul by sin, even after repentance and forgiveness, calls out for redress. Scars must be healed. It is possible, according to these doctrines, that God has granted that the good work of one is effective to heal not only his own scars, but the scars of another, and that the recipient of such love is himself enabled to raise up his own prayers for the first. In the midst of this economy, the pope is able to open the storehouses of Christ's grace at his discretion, to the end that certain souls are blessed, and also that the whole community of the church is spurred to greater devotion. The church, in this light, is a spiritual princedom.

What most lifted my spirit, apart from the beautiful voices of the male choir and the people all singing the latin prayers, was the LIFE. Half the communicants must have been under the age of twenty-five, and hardly a missal in sight, they all knew the ancient words. Such life has many taproots, one of which is a sound theology of the family, a subject perhaps fitting for a future post....

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children

Our unlikeness from our ancestors calcifies yearly, as the egg-shell hardens in the womb of the bird. The grandeur of Europe is dead, in its place is a cynical establishment that celebrates a culture of the kitsch, the unmanly, the unfeminine, an abstractive, self-reflexive, self-parodic serpent, which will devour the world before it devours itself. Those uninitiated in this new Dionysian cultural cannibalism live in the entrails of the beast, grasping for dollars with which to buy unearned and dishonorable pleasure and power. In the periodic sufferings of the economic cycle, these acolytes are allowed to despair, perhaps commit suicide, shat into the void, thereby revealing themselves to be weak, and therefore unworthy of the secret knowledge, which is that the world is a Joke without a mouth or a face, that in reality (what is reality?) it is Nothing.

Who among us can walk through the halls of Blenheim, follow the silken melodies of Vaughan Williams, feel the intellectual passion of Rodin, pray in the pews of Notre Dame, ascend the steps to the halls of Congress, study the prudence of Madison, or, closer to our own day, read the grave optimism of T.H. White, and grieve at all for what is gone? We have not the power to feel, for we are cut off from attachment by a horrible bank of garbage, moral, theological, aesthetic. We may ascend the heights of our own side, and view what remains of Western culture with a pleasant detachment, but we lack a sense of belonging.

I believe this is extremely dangerous. At this time we lack a traditional high culture. The whim may arise at any time in our cultural leadership to destroy what relics remain of the old. At those times, and until we regain a confident aesthetic based in a Christian faith, we will have no defense other than our grief to protect these things. Architecture and landscape are clearly the most obvious victims, for they require upkeep and they use valuable land, which is always in demand in this world. But the other high arts are just as much in danger, though for a more subtle, more basic cause. Critical knowledge is easily lost. Taste and judgment and appropriate enjoyment of the good, the true, and the beautiful are not developed by accident, but by purposeful education. The aim to develop such appreciation has largely disappeared from the modern university. If it disappears utterly, then Beethoven and de Tocqueville will be just as invisible as a bulldozed St. Paul's.

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. We must carry on grieving. Teach yourselves, find teachers, to cultivate your taste for Western culture. Steep yourself in it, make the painful sacrifice of emotion necessary to take your place as PART of it. Remember your home with longing and love, so that when they come to destroy it utterly, you may tuck a memory of it away with you. Preserve it in your personal library, share it with your children. Information in books is not enough. You must learn it by heart, and cherish it as your own. Some day the modern world may forget its hatred of the past, and the children of our descendants will be allowed to play in the ruins of the old world. The monastic orders may again become significant. Even then the learning must be preserved. When the renaissance finally comes (and who knows how long that will be?), this knowledge will be valuable, and the grain of wheat that fell to the ground and died will bear much fruit. This is your responsibility to your inheritance, thrown as it has been to the four winds. Gather what you can, add to it if you will from your own soul, and wait for a better day.


Piero di Cosimo - Perseus Frees Andromeda (1513)

Thought for the Day No. 5: Ambition

Tucked inside the hope of greatness is a worm of discontent, slumbering. It will wake at the dawn of fulfillment and begin to gnaw, unless it is killed. How is such a worm killed? Must the soul be sliced from the soul? Would this be a good thing?

A Snippet of Praise

From The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1978), p. 164, by John Senior - the heir of Mark Van Doren, co-founder of the University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program, and professor to David Whalen:

"Christopher Dawson, who tried to prove that medieval Christianity was responsible for the whole idea of progress, achieved an academic respectability denied to the cantankerous old Romantic, anti-Modern, and greater historian, Belloc."

The Future of U.S. Politics - An Irresponsible Prediction

The greatest political danger the United States republic will face in the coming decades is an alliance of libertarian economic and ethical logic (a means) with a progressive utopian vision of pleasure for all (an ends). The crowds loved President Obama's rhetoric - he talked about peace and harmony and well-being - but now they see what that costs, they don't like him. If the Democrats are smart, they'll scrap state socialism just like Tony Blair scrapped state collectivism. Who really cares about the poor, after all? Well, the poor care about the poor, and they have a vote in hand. So to keep their vote, what will be offered them in compensation for inequality of wealth and success? Equality of pleasure. Make pleasure the new dollar. Since the poor can produce sex just as well as the rich, give them sexual unrestraint, and everyone will be wealthy. The middle-class will have their money, and the rich will have their orgies. Everyone will be happy. High-five to J.S. Mill.

To this end, watch for signs in public education that children are being taught more and more about fulfilling their desire for pleasure, especially for sexual pleasure, and especially at the expense of the desire for public honor in the role of citizen or statesman. They will be taught to trade their rights as a citizen for their rights as a hormone factory.

Also watch for euthanasia defended on slighter and slighter grounds, so that a man who is merely chronically angry or depressed is given the option to kill himself. That will have the excellent effect, among other excellent effects, of staving off political dissent.

How should a virtuous person respond to all this? Invest in morphine production. You'll make a killing.

The Odd People

Belloc praises a non-religious people:
from "The Odd People", On Something, (London: Meuthen and Co., 1910), pp. 97-99.

"I should add that the Monomotapans have no religion; but the tolerance of their Constitution is nowhere better shown than in this particular, for though they themselves regard religion as ridiculous, they will permit its exercise within the State, and even occasionally give high office and emoluments to those who practise it.

We have, indeed, much to learn in this matter of religion from the race whose habits I have discovered and here describe. Nothing, perhaps, has done more to warp our own story than the hide-bound prejudice that a doctrine could not be both false and true at the same time, and the unreasoning certitude, inherited from the bad old days of clerical tyranny, that a thing either was or was not.

No such narrowness troubles the Monomotapan. He will prefer - and very wisely prefer - an opinion that renders him comfortable to one that in any way interferes with his appetites; and if two such opinions contradict each other, he will not fall into a silly casuistry which would attempt to reconcile them: he will quietly accept both, and serve the Higher Purpose with a contended mind.

It is on this account that I have said that the Monomotapans regard religion as ridiculous. For true religion, indeed (as they phrase it), they have the highest reverence; and true religion consists in following the inclinations of an honest man, that is, oneself: but "religion in the sense of fixed doctrine," as one of their priests explained to me, "is abhorrent to our free commonwealth." Thus such hair-splitting questions as whether God really exists or no, whether it be wrong to kill or to steal, whether we owe any duties to the State, and, if so, what duties, are treated by the honest Monomotapans with the contempt they deserve: they abandon such speculation for the worthy task of enjoying, each man, what his fortune permits him to enjoy.

But, as I have said above, they do not persecute the small minority living in their midst who cling with the tenacity of all starved minds to their fixed ideas; and if a man who professes certitude upon doctrinal matters is useful in other ways, they are very far from refusing his services to the State. I have known more than one, for instance, of this old-fashioned and bigoted lot who, when he offered a sum of money in order to be admitted to the Senate of Monomotapa, found it accepted as readily and cheerfully as though it has been offered by one of the broadest principles and the most liberal mind.

Let no one be surprised that I have spoken of their priests, for though the Monomotapans regard religion with due contempt, it does not follow that they will take away the livelihood of a very honest class of people who in an older and barbaric state of affairs were employed to maintain the structure of what was then a public worship. The priesthood, therefore, is very justly and properly retained by the Monomotapans, subject only to a few simple duties and to a sacred intonation of voice very distressing to those not accustomed to it. If I am asked in what occupation they are employed, I answer, the wealthier of them in such sports and futilities as attract the wealthy, and the less wealthy in such futilities and sports as the less wealthy customarily enjoy. Nor is it a rigid law among them that the sons of priests should be priests, but only the custom - so far, at least, as I have been able to discover."

Thought for the Day No. 4: Dialogue in England

The average Englishman or woman exhibits a terrible indifference to common sense moral philosophy, which indifference often runs over into contempt. I wonder whether this is partly a consequence of the schools and universities for too long taking the analytic tradition dogmatically. For contrary to the established analytic procedure, common sense moral philosophy operates in both the deductive and inductive directions at once.